


and i fought time (it won in a landslide)

by gayprophets



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Fan Made Abomination, Graphic Descriptions of Injuries, Guilt, Horror, Pre-Canon, Rated For Violence, designed specifically to give you the crawling horrors, mama study.... 2!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 13:37:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20258965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayprophets/pseuds/gayprophets
Summary: The abomination kills Jean Mason. It’s not a clean death. Mama would hate to be killed by such a thing, but the longer she stands in its sightline, the more likely that ending to this fight feels.-A fight with an abomination pre-canon and before Barclay joined the Pine Guard - a little peek in at Mama and her mental state. Saving your town is lonely, and difficult.





	and i fought time (it won in a landslide)

**Author's Note:**

> the death of an oc is at the beginning. this is just basically horror idk what else to tell you. be careful.  
title from timefighter by lucy dacus which is a fucking BANGER.

The abomination kills Jean Mason. It’s not a clean death. Mama would hate to be killed by such a thing, but the longer she stands in its sightline, the more likely that ending to this fight feels.

It’s a terrible thing to look at. Its head is misshapen, turned upside-down on its neck, chin to the sky, gaping mouth and human teeth - they are human, although there are so many more of them, smooth and even and orderly like a well kept graveyard. Its lips are painted blood red sloppily, slovenly, like a toddler playing with their mothers lipstick. It rests its weight on the very tips of its long, pale fingers and long, pale toes, spine arched in a distinctly feline manner, every bone creaking with the breaths it pulls in slowly, and exhales like its been punched. It has no nose, and no eyes, but it looks right through Mama. It sees her. It knows her. Mama stares back at it. The lights in the store flicker rapidly as she does so, like a strobe. The bulbs hum and whine with excess charge. A few shatter.

The abomination is built like a sighthound, huge barrel chest with a contoured, tapered waist, long dainty limbs, whip thin and sharply muscular. It could outrun her truck without a problem, she’s sure. Jean Mason’s body lies on the ground behind it, near the wall by the cash register, and his gun safe. Mama wouldn’t know it was Jean Mason if it wasn’t his shop. All that’s left of him is a splatter, minced bits of meat and brain sprayed up over the walls, bones reduced to mealy pulp. She wonders if it chased him down from the front as he was locking up, slipping through the door and then slamming into him as he ran from it for a weapon, teeth first. The air smells - clean. Like ozone. She inhales, and the lack of wet-penny blood is startling.

The abomination skitters in place, like a nervous teen on their first date, unable to properly plant its feet.

It smiles at her, upside-down, and then it charges.

In her effort to kill the abomination right back, Mama burns his store to the ground. It’s not entirely her fault. It’s an old place, shoddily wired, built from materials practically designed to catch fire, and that combined with the abominations minor electrical surges means she can already smell something charring in the walls by the time one of her shots sets something alight. She has to stumble out of the building as it sparks up like a box of matches, barely sure that she’s managed the killing blow - between the smoke and the hot lick of the flames, it’s hard to distinguish what’s a four armed light creature perishing and what’s just moving smoke more fucking  _ fire. _

It stinks, she learns, when buildings burn. 

Insulation and drywall  _ reek _ like the dead as they smolder, unlike the crisp smoke of a campfire. She chokes into the bandana she has wrapped around her mouth and nose, smashes through a cracked window with her elbow. It's a mistake - glass rips into her arm and the inferno burst higher with the new addition of fuel - but she hops out the window with minimal burns and staggers away to safety, into the woods. She can hear sirens, far off in the distance. They’ll get there too late. By the time they pull up, the store will be gone, and so will she.

She’s careful to step only where the pine needles and leaves will hide her footprints, even in her panic. She’s always so, so careful. The air is cool in her mouth and throat, but it hurts still. The moon above leers down through the trees. She throws herself into her truck, parked off to the side on a service road, and almost stalls out as she tries to get out of there. 

She doesn’t feel anything, other than the desire to be home already, to call this week a wash and slip under her blankets and not move for a day or two.

Safety first, though. She can’t get arrested for murder. Mama puts her boots in the donation bin outside the library, drives the rest of the way home in her socks. She strips the moment she’s through the door to her apartment, eager to get the smell off of her, and barely has a moment to register the feeling of  _ home, safe, _ before she’s vomiting into the sink. It scrapes up her raw throat and hurts like she’s poured lemon juice onto a wound, mostly bile. She hacks out a wad of sticky, smokey, grey-black mucus and turns on the water to wash her sick away, then just sticks her head straight under the tap. 

What happens after that is a mystery. Mama wakes up on her couch under her afgan feeling like she’s been hit by a truck, with no memory of the rest of her night. It’s early morning - or late evening, her clock is analog, she’ll know depending on if it gets lighter or darker - and the sky outside her window is grey, dim, but not rainy. There’s a glass of water on her coffee table with two advil sitting next to it, helpfully. It’s quiet both in her head and in her building, she holds still, holds her breath until she feels her heartbeat in her chest, slow and calm and steady. Her refrigerator grumbles along in the background, tunelessly, then shuts itself off with a clunk. Mama tangles her fingers in the holes of the stitching in the blanket, realizing as she does so that her ring and index fingers have been taped together and splinted. That’s alright, then. At least she took care of herself while taking a rain check from being in her body. 

She catalogs her injuries from her head down, slowly shifting as she does so to eek out what’s complaining the most. Her head’s pounding with a headache, but she doesn’t think she hit it on anything. She remembers that George Bush is president, which makes rage spark in her chest - dull and muted, but there nonetheless - so she’s probably not concussed. He’s getting ousted in January regardless, it doesn’t help her to be angry now. Her neck’s stiff, but she’s pretty sure that’s from sleeping on the couch and not an actual injury. 

Her throat hurts like a bitch, and her breath catches with every rattling inhale. She’d think that being a smoker would negate some of this, but apparently not. Her lungs ache unpleasantly, and her ribs are sore and bruised. She doesn’t think she broke any though, nothing sharp enough for that. Her left shoulder and hip ache from when they’d hit a wall - the thing threw her like she was nothing, like she’s seen cats battering mice around, playing with its food. Air chuffs from between its smooth, perfect teeth, wet and hot on her face, looming over her in the sharp, thin moments before she’d managed to get a grip on her pistol and blast it in the empty space where its eyes would have been, and it wheeled back to wheeze out a thready, high scream.

She very carefully doesn’t move until she no longer feels the thing looking at her. It’s dead, she’s sure (she hopes that was the flicker of white she saw, standing quiet and solemn, its stately form twisted at the waist to gaze at her in the haze of smoke, one set of arms crossed, the other set loose at its sides. It has to be. It couldn’t have been a trick of the light and oxygen deprivation.) but the feeling lingers in her memories and clings to her body like a cobweb. 

Her right knee is twisted, swollen and stiff, but workable. It’s in a black brace and a long since melted ice pack has been strapped to it. Her arms are the real collection of injuries. 

The right has her fingers, splinted, and the cuts from the glass are scabbed over, but they crack and bleed under the gauze they’re wrapped in when she straightens her elbow. Her other arm is strapped to her chest. She thinks she may have dislocated that shoulder, actually, and gets a flashbulb memory of taking her wrist in her other hand, pulling it forward, and  _ pop. _ All of her exposed skin feels tight and dry, and her eyebrows have been partially burned off. There’s a few first degree burns, one that’s maybe second on her forearm. She thinks she struck it on a piece of burning wood. She should have gone to the hospital. 

She calls Thacker, who immediately cusses her out for not calling sooner, so worried he’s angry. The abomination had taken him out earlier in the week with the same move - a swipe of the overly long hand and he’d gone through a wall, gotten a concussion, and broken his arm. They’d lost Jimmy to the last abomination. And his wife, Lisette, but not because she’d died - she had quietly packed up and moved away before the earth had even had time to properly settle over his casket. It’s just the two of them now, for who knows how long. Another abomination like this one and she thinks it might just be one of them, or none.

The thought settles like a stone in the pit of her stomach, makes her feel cold to the bone. God help Kepler if that happens.

“Mason’s store burnt down,” Thacker says, after he’s gotten all his yelling out of the way. “That you?”

Mama hums. She doesn’t feel like talking. 

“Christ,” he says. “He get out of there?”

“He was DOA,” Mama says. Her voice is a gravelly whisper. “Not enough left of him to carry out.”

There’s silence on the line, then a crackle of static as Thacker inhales, exhales.

“You gonna be okay?” Thacker asks. “And are we gonna get arrested for murder?”

“We’ll see,” Mama says, an answer to both. “I’ll drop by tomorrow, make sure you ain’t up and died on me.” She hangs up before he can reply. 

Only, there isn’t a murder investigation.

Word goes around that Jean Mason burned his store down and then skipped town to collect the insurance money. People shake their heads, cluck their tongues, and the lot gets repossessed and sold and repurposed when nobody pays taxes to keep it. 

Mama says nothing.

The sheriff is vocal about how little he cares when it comes to the town - he’s on his way to retirement and eager for it, and Deputy Zeke, his polar opposite, cares too much to gossip about an open investigation. Perhaps there should have been some looking into the disappearance, but the court of public opinion tends to reign over small towns, and he doesn’t have any real family or friends to miss him. Jean Mason’s name gets dragged through the mud. Mama says nothing. She bites her tongue until she tastes blood. 

**Author's Note:**

> shrugs. This was supposed to have more to it but it fizzled and rather than hoarding it like i do with all of my fizzled work i thought i'd just post it! love you mama sorry i project so much onto you.  
It was going to have a happier ending and be uplifting because i really hate just straight up angst - i feel like it really drags people down and just doesn't reflect well onto the author, so like... idk, read other pieces after this that will make you feel good and not terrible? reading just Angst isnt good for you. stop that.  
you can find me at themlet on tumblr jhfjhds i changed my url. like manlet, but for nb people. comments and kudos appreciated <3


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